September 2014
www.tvbeurope.com in association with
TVBEurope iii 4K Supplement
room, consumer uptake will soon follow. The industry must ensure that the quality of that content is preserved throughout the various different stages of delivery. The NAB Show broadcast highlighted that to ensure the requisite level of quality, 4K UHDTV video compressed signals require 4:2:2 chroma sampling and 10-bit depth for all content. This ensures consistency of colour fidelity through the many encode, decode and re-encode stages, and through multiple editing stages. 50-60 frames per second is needed for sports and complex motion content. This is crucial in order to enable a vivid, realistic experience, comparable to being at the venue itself.
Higher frame rates than those used for
standard definition (SD) and HD are required to represent fast motion and to avoid motion blur or motion judder. Large 4K screens necessitate 50-60 frame rates at present because there is more spatial movement for the viewer. Higher frame rates help to compensate for the greater angular change caused by fast motion displayed on these larger screens, ensuring that no visual artefacts are observed. This is especially apparent for high-motion TV content such as sport. Motion blur is caused because the camera shutter is open long enough that the images appear smeared to the viewer. The future may dictate higher frame rates of anything up to 120 frames per second in later phases of the technology, as this will enhance resolution on fast motion. Nevertheless, this will also incur significant additional costs for production and post-production.
4K UHDTV: What lessons have we learnt?
4K UHDTV is about far more than just 4K resolutions. It is about building a viable business model for enhanced TV services which can deliver the next generation television viewing experience that will fundamentally change the way people think about and view TV. It’s about moving away from looking at something as a picture in a frame towards something that’s truly immersive. Ericsson has taken part in more than 40 UHD-1 phase 1 tests with a variety of different partners and media organisations, enabling a number of world first events. We have been able to collate a wide collection of empirical data that we have shared with our customers and the wider industry. This testing phase resulted in Ericsson winning the 2014 NAB Technology Innovation Award for its demonstrations of the standard. In the last 12 months we have learnt a lot about shooting sports in live 4K by enabling
coverage of live events such as the the World Cup. Ericsson’s annual ConsumerLab research into TV and media highlights that consumers want to ‘experience’ video content, rather than simply viewing it on a screen. A ‘true’ 4K UHDTV broadcast must therefore deliver a compelling viewing experience and these crowd- pulling events are fundamental in driving this heightened level of quality. Sporting events not only provide the setting for the most immersive viewing experience possible, they offer TV service providers with a means to prove that new, higher quality standards such as 4K UHDTV have longer-term commercial viability. These trials also help to promote the technology’s profile and brand recognition. We can capture the complexity of a hurdler’s movements, the flight of a ball from a 40-yard free kick, and the sheer explosion of pace as a sprinter such as Usain Bolt drives down the final leg of a 4x100m relay race. Consumers see sport as valuable premium content and it is content they are willing to pay for. By demonstrating the stunning improvement of the screen quality, consumers will increasingly demand this superior TV experience.
Creating a sustainable 4K UHDTV business model To enable a sustainable and commercially successful 4K UHDTV business model, broadcasters must drive the availability of 4K-ready consumer devices, broadcast equipment and the creation of new 4K UHDTV content. This will be vital in terms of driving consumer demand, particularly as mobile devices make up an increasing share of TV and video viewing. We are already starting to see the growth of this technology’s popularity; a March 2014 report from Business Insider Intelligence predicts that ten per cent of all North American households will have 4K-capable TVs by the end of 2018, with the figure reaching 50 per cent by the end of 2024.
4K UHDTV is about far more than just 4K resolutions. It is about building a viable business model for enhanced TV services which can deliver the next generation television viewing experience that will fundamentally change the way people think about and view TV
Live 4K productions are now a proven possibility, although there are still a number of technical barriers to overcome, including cost and bandwidth efficiency. In that sense, the standardisation of HEVC is key to enabling 4K UHDTV in the home. Its arrival has helped to solve a number of compression issues by offering the potential to halve the bitrate of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, making the delivery of ‘true’ 4K UHDTV a realistic prospect. Ericsson lab research shows that a high performance encoder that can achieve a halving of existing bandwidth takes about ten times the processing power than that of MPEG-4 AVC. For 4K UHDTV, there is also four times as much spatial resolution and twice the temporal resolution compared to HD, making a total of 80x the processing power compared to HD MPEG-4 AVC.
Although a wider deployment of 4K UHDTV services is not expected until 2015, a number of on-demand services for movie content (streaming and downloads) are already beginning to appear this year. OTT aggregators such as Netflix are offering a number of shows, including exclusive content such as Orange is the New Black and House of Cards, via 4K Ultra HD internet streaming. In July 2014, the DVB- UHDTV standard received approval in Europe, which will further enable new possibilities for 4K UHDTV services, both for satellite and for over- the-air platforms. This increase in competition is extremely important as it is driving consumer demand, which in turn is providing a quantifiable return on investment for broadcasters and TV service providers. This will ultimately justify the wider rollout of the technology in the future. There are various ways in which the broadcast industry can enhance the consumer experience and we should be aware that 4K UHDTV is just one of a number of different format changes to television that may emerge in the next few years. For instance, High Dynamic Range (HDR) could prove equally as significant as 4K in the longer term by providing an enhanced user experience with image representations that closer match the human visual system’s capability of processing image data than today’s TV systems can manage, irrespective of screen size. Nevertheless, the future of the 4K UHDTV standard and consequent adoption rates will be highly dependent on the way in which the TV industry presents the technology. 4K UHDTV is a fantastic proposition, bringing viewers closer to the screen than ever before. While mass deployment could prove a gradual process, 4K UHDTV is the next logical step in the evolution of TV services, transforming the viewing experience and raising the quality threshold in the process.
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